Now we have a new phase of this product that shows the evolution of monitoring services and servers using Cloud Computing. At TechEd this year in Houston, the product team has announced the Preview of the new version, which I will detail here after the Beta testing. The table on the site shows the evolution of resources:

Activation and Cost

So far as Preview, the SCA continues as a free product, simply by using a Microsoft Account (formerly Passport) to activate the account.

For customers who had already integrated the SCA with SCOM, the agent update is performed automatically.

If you don’t know, see instructions in the above items for activation and integration with SCOM.

New Interface

The interface of the SCA Preview is very similar to the Preview of Microsoft Azure and shows the tendency of new products in terms of design, and when opening the Home we have a Web-based interface, with a summary of all Intelligence assets and Packs the situation summarized for each item:

Intelligence Packs

The Intelligence Packs are monitoring packages that can be added to the account, as the additional "Configuration Assessment" that already exists in the current version. Remembering that the Intelligence Packs does not yet have the definition of the activation cost.

To add new Intelligence Packs or remove the already active use the +/-button in the upper right corner of the screen and have the list of Intelligence Packs available for activation, with some still not available and with the new time will be added:

As an example, activated Intelligence Pack of "Log Management ”"

To activate an Intelligence Pack this appears on the Home with the statement that needs to be set if necessary. In the case of "Log Management" performed by Setup include the log name of Windows that would be added and the event filter, if desired:

The next day, after activating monitoring for a few hours already have the data available, as the Home at the beginning of this article. Am customer "Log Management" we can see the details of data and use Queries to access the detailed Log data as the second image below where you can see the most common event type in a particular log:

Another Intelligence Pack added that brings a return valuable is the "Antimalware" to analyze possible security holes, updates not applied and even virus/trojans known:

For functions that already exist in the Advisor, there were substantial improvements as we can see in the summary below, where we have besides the more than 300 alerts available now we have recommendations based on KBs and the analysis of workloads, by type of product as can be seen below in the summary of configuration and detailing of alerts:

Conclusion

System Center Advisor is now mature and sure enough untold resource inclusions with the release of the final product.

For those who already have an account, simply activate the Preview in https://preview.systemcenteradvisor.com and using integrated with SCOM automatic will have the new features being monitored with the activation of Intelligence Packs.